


Love and Grief

by AgentStannerShipper



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Pre-Season/Series 14, The Power Of Love, background sam/rowena, prayers, pre-destiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-10-11 06:53:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17442038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentStannerShipper/pseuds/AgentStannerShipper
Summary: There are different kinds of grief.





	Love and Grief

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this just before the season started, but I didn't get around to posting it until now. Figured I'd get it out before the mid-season hiatus is over. Hopefully it doesn't suck.

In the aftermath, Jack had expected more sadness. He was familiar with grief; he’d felt it, felt his mother’s anguish when she’d tried to end him, before she’d understood that he didn’t want to hurt her. He’d felt his own grief when he had hurt her anyway, when his life had cost his mother hers. He’d grieved Castiel’s loss, the father he was supposed to have but hadn’t gotten. He’d grieved new friends in Apocalypse World, taken too soon. And he’d seen it in others, seen Dean and Sam affected so deeply by the loss of their mother, by the loss of Cas, by the people that died around them. He’d seen it, felt it, and so Jack knew that grief was an expected reaction to a great loss.

Castiel was not grieving. At least, not in any way Jack was familiar with. Although, to be fair, Jack was less than a year old, so there were very many things he was not yet familiar with. He knew Sam was sad, but driven, much like when Jack had first met him and he’d been desperate to get Mary back. But Castiel…all the fight had left him. He pushed through, he set his jaw and followed Sam’s lead, but Jack could see there was an emptiness beneath the determined shell, like something had been torn away the same way Lucifer had torn away Jack’s powers. Like there was a piece inside him that was missing.

“Stop staring, lad. You look too much like the brooding angel when you do it, and it is not his most attractive look.”

At the lilting Scottish accent, Jack tore his gaze away from Castiel, who was leaning over the War Room’s table, head bent together with Sam’s. Jack’s fingers curled a little more tightly around the railing as he looked up – not very far, because the witch beside him wasn’t very tall – and met Rowena’s gaze. He shifted, looking away again and studying the floor. Rowena made him nervous, although he wasn’t entirely sure why. “Is Castiel brooding?” he asked quietly. He was somewhat familiar with the word, but he wasn’t sure it applied.

Rowena tilted her head, the mess of red curls falling sideways and sweeping over her shoulder. “No, I suppose not,” she said. “He’s just heartbroken. Doesn’t know what to do with himself. Can’t be easy, I suppose, having your beloved stuck in the same body as your brother. Especially when your brother is bent on world-domination and he’s driving shotgun.”

Jack blinked twice. “Castiel is…heartbroken?” He blinked again, then cocked his head. “Is Castiel in love with Dean?” He was familiar with love too, although he knew he had yet to experience all the forms of it. Familial love, platonic love, those he understood on a personal level. But he didn’t know much about romantic love. His mother had apparently felt it for the vessel Lucifer had possessed to father him, and he had witnessed it in others, but it manifested so differently that he had yet to truly identify the markers of it.

Rowena smiled and patted his head. Combined with her condescending tone, it rankled Jack a bit. “Oh, wee lamb. They never did give you the talk, did they?”

“The talk?”

“The birds and the bees. You know. When a fallen angel and a repressed human love each other very much-“

“Dean says he and Castiel are like brothers,” Jack interrupted. “They love each other like family.”

Rowena lifted her eyebrows. “Do they act like brothers?”

Jack contemplated it. He didn’t have much of a frame of reference, but he had to conclude that Dean’s behavior around Sam was not the same as behavior around Castiel. But that could be attributed to the fact that they were not biologically related. “I don’t know,” he concluded.

“Well, you’re still young,” Rowena said. She patted his head again. “Don’t give it another thought. A lad like you is too young to be thinking about love anyway.”

Before Jack could retort that he really wasn’t that young, Sam called up to them, “Whenever you feel like coming down?”

Rowena beamed down at him over the railing. “I was just having a wee chat with the boy.” She started to make her way down the stairs. Jack followed her stiffly.

Castiel’s jaw was set in that familiar way. Jack was quickly becoming used to the look. “You were skulking,” he rumbled, without looking at Rowena.

Rowena put a hand to her heart and gasped. “Me? Skulk? I would never.” She pouted towards Sam. “That’s hardly a way to treat a guest.”

Sam rolled him eyes. “Okay, stop antagonizing each other.” He glanced towards Jack, then back at Rowena. “And leave Jack alone. No offense, but you’re a bit…”

Jack watched as Rowena put a hand on Sam’s arm – more accurately, on his elbow, which was the part most easily within her reach – and Sam trailed off and flushed faintly. “I promise, Samuel,” she cooed. “I am on my best behavior.”

Castiel shoved his hands into the pockets of his trench coat with a force Jack hadn’t expected for the benign gesture. “I’m going to check on Mary,” he said. “See how her work is getting along.”

Jack watched him go, glancing back at Rowena and Sam, who appeared to be absorbed in their conversation. Sam had hardly even given Castiel a farewell. Jack left them to it and followed Castiel down the hall.

But Castiel was going the wrong way if he wanted to speak to Mary. Jack was fairly certain she was in the bunker’s kitchen, where she liked to spread out with a couple of books, a laptop, and a beer (she reminded Jack of Sam when she did that, and at times like that Jack wondered how Sam failed to see himself in his mother), but Castiel bypassed the kitchen altogether and continued down the bunker’s twisting hallways.

Jack hung back a little. He was not especially well-versed in the nuances of interaction just yet, but he was fairly certain that Castiel lying to Sam about his intentions implied he did not wish his true intentions to be known. Jack also knew that he probably shouldn’t have been following Castiel, were that the case, but he was curious.

Castiel stopped at Dean’s door, and Jack ducked back around the corner. He peered out and watched Castiel rest his forehead against the wood and close his eyes. His fingers curled around the doorknob, but then hesitated in turning it. Jack held his breath.

After several long moments, Castiel exhaled in a long, shaky sigh, and then pushed open the door. He stepped inside the room, and Jack crept forward, peering around the edge of the doorframe just enough to get a glimpse of the room. It was fairly Spartan, but with some clear signs that it was inhabited. Or, at least, that it had been inhabited recently. Before…

Castiel was sitting on the bed. His fingers were bunched up in the bedsheets, still unmade, untouched since Dean had left it last. His head was bowed, as if in prayer. Jack couldn’t hear angel radio anymore, but he could almost feel the charge in the air. He ducked back behind the door, pressing his back to the wall as Castiel began to speak.

But it wasn’t directed at Jack.

“This isn’t a prayer for Michael,” Castiel said, very quietly. “I’m not…I don’t know if he would hear it anyway, but it’s not for him. It’s for Dean.”

Jack wasn’t sure prayers worked like that, going from angels to humans instead of the other way around, but he wasn’t about to interrupt Castiel to question it.

Castiel continued, “Dean, I…I don’t know if you can hear me. It’s…it’s probably better if you can’t. But maybe having Michael possessing you means you can, or maybe our bond…” Castiel sighed. “I don’t know how to say this, Dean. But just because you don’t bear my mark anymore doesn’t mean we don’t still have our bond. I…I lifted you from hell. That will always tie us together. Even like this.”

Jack pressed a little closer to the wall as he heard the bed rustling, presumably from Castiel shifting on it. Castiel kept speaking. “I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, that bond means you can hear me. Because we need you to fight, Dean. Sam and Mary need you to fight. Jack needs you to fight, _I_ need you to fight. You need to reject Michael and come back to us. To me. We can’t keep doing this, Dean. I lose you, you lose me, I lose you again…we keep going in circles and I need it to stop. I can’t…it’s too hard to bear, Dean. Knowing you’re out there, that Michael is out there in your body, using it for…whatever his goal is. So if you’re listening, Dean, I need you to promise me that you’ll do whatever you can to fight him. Whatever it takes.”

There was a sound, a deep shuddering breath, and Jack realized with a start that Castiel, who he hadn’t seen grieving up to this point, stoic Castiel who had plowed on with all of Sam’s plans with his jaw set and his eyes hollow, was crying. Castiel was sitting on Dean’s bed, praying to him, and he was crying.

Castiel’s voice wavered for a moment, and then came a little stronger. “I need you to do whatever it takes because I need to tell you…we need to talk, Dean. I hadn’t said anything, because the world was always ending, but it’s never going to stop ending and I can’t keep using that as an excuse. I need you to know how I feel. I need you to give me that opportunity, to tell you. And I don’t know if you’ll feel the same way, or if you just love me like you say, like a brother. But I need you to give me the opportunity to say something. Because I’m done, Dean Winchester, do you hear me? I’m done keeping it to myself.”

Rowena was right. Jack wouldn’t call the realization begrudging; he liked the witch, more or less. She seemed to make Sam strangely happy, or at least less sad than usual, and she was kind to him and to Castiel, when she wasn’t teasing the latter or speaking down to Jack. Even Mary kind of liked her. But it did irritate Jack a little bit that she’d known and he hadn’t realized.

Castiel cleared his throat. “Sorry. Dean, I’m…I’m sorry. Just…come back. If not for me, then for Sam. Please.”

Jack edged away from the door. He shouldn’t have been listening, he knew that. He’d feel guilty next time he faced Castiel. But right now, he needed to give the angel the privacy he should have given him from the start. He paced back through the bunker, his footsteps evening out into a more normal pace the farther he got from Dean’s room.

Rowena and Sam were where he’d left them, but they were kissing, and Jack pulled a face and turned right back around again. He was happy for Sam, but he supposed Rowena was right about at least one thing. He really was young, and that kind of love was something he didn’t want to think about just yet.

Mary was, as he’d predicted, in the kitchen, her books and her laptop spread out, a beer in her hands as she flipped through pages and occasionally refreshed the screen. Jack settled on the chair next to her and folded his arms on the table, resting his chin on them. They sat in silence for several minutes. The peace was nice; with so many people in the bunker these days, it was hard to get a moment’s quiet.

Eventually, Mary glanced at him. She kept her eyes on her work when she addressed him, though. “What’s up, Jack?”

Jack debated giving her a general answer. He knew that was the socially appropriate thing to do. Instead, he said, “We’re going to get Dean back.”

Mary looked at him sharply, and then her features softened. “Yes, we are,” she said. There was no room in her voice for argument.

“We need to get him back so Castiel can stop being sad,” Jack said. “And so we all can be a family again.”

Surprise flickered across Mary’s face before she smiled. “Yes,” she said again. “So we can be a family again. All of us.”

Jack knew there were many different kinds of love. He loved Mary like a mother, or perhaps a grandmother, given that he loved Castiel, Dean, and Sam like fathers, or elder brothers possibly…at any rate, he loved them like family. No, not _like_ family. They _were_ family. And Castiel loved Dean, and Sam and Rowena probably loved each other…maybe, and Jack couldn’t be sure how Dean loved Castiel, but he knew there was love there nonetheless. He loved his friends from Apocalypse World, too, and he knew Mary loved them as much as he did. The bunker was full of love, and Jack knew he’d be called naïve if he ever said it out loud, and maybe he was, but that didn’t change the fact that Jack was completely and utterly convinced that love was going to get Dean back for them. Love was going to beat Michael. Maybe not directly, but it would be the driving force behind all of their actions, and it _would_ make their family whole again.

Jack was sure of it.


End file.
